Here at the quiet limit of the world
by daphno
Summary: It starts off as closure. That's what they write on the form. Cassandra Fraiser, 18, civilian, requests travel to Hanka (designated P8X-987), purpose: reconnaissance. Entire SG-1 team Cassie bonding! Spoilers for Heroes Pt 2.


**Set during season 7. Major spoilers for Heroes Part 2. That's all I'm saying.**

**Originally published on AO3, transferring here because of reasons.**

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It starts off as closure. That's what they write on the form. _Cassandra Fraiser, 18, civilian, requests travel to Hanka (designated P8X-987), purpose: reconnaissance. _Hammond grants it with only a little hesitancy, scheduling the gate for use exactly six days after Janet's funeral. He gives her a mini-briefing the morning of her travel date and she listens with the calm sort of respect she imagines her mother used to. There is little need for him to explain the rules to her; she's practically grown up in this place, but she appreciates the need for formality. At the end he smiles at her.

"You're to follow protocol at all times, understand?"

"Yes sir." Though he's not her boss, it is conditioned in her to address him as such. He nods once, and she wonders if he sees her mother in her place.

The gate room is colder than she remembers, not that she really remembers it. It has scarcely changed, although the Stargate seems much, much smaller now. She stands on the ramp, her head tilted to take in the full scale of the gate. Barely two weeks ago, this room had been host to her mother's memorial service. She still has the flag from the burial, folded neatly on the stack of boxes that she has recently moved into Sam's spare bedroom.

"Hey!" Jack's voice precedes him into the gate room. "Off the ramp while they power this thing up kiddo." He is wearing his BDUs as a matter of course, even though they know all too well that their destination is utterly deserted. Cassie herself wears a small uniform, faded from use but still functioning. She wears a spare jacket that says 'Carter' on, and she tells herself it doesn't matter that they couldn't find an old one of her mother's. Doesn't matter at all.

She moves to stand beside him and his hand settles on her back, warm and familiar. "You sure about this?" His voice is calm and serious; he is not judging, and for once he is not joking.

She nods. "Pretty much."

"It's not too late to back out." She is all too aware that on the list of things Uncle Jack wants to avoid, sending her through the gate is pretty high up.

"I don't _want_ to back out, you know?"

"Yeah, I know." He knows all too well, she thinks. She knows a little, but not everything, about his son who would be mere days older than herself. She knows enough to know that, after he died, Jack gravitated back to the room where it happened, that unexplainable pull inside him taking hold. It is this that Cassie feels, this tug towards what she has lost.

The speakers come on and a gravelly voice announces that the dialling sequence has begun. The gate begins spinning, lazily at first, increasing in speed until Cassandra cannot keep her eyes focused on the spinning 'Earth' symbol. She flinches as the wormhole forms, vaulting out in front of her, and Uncle Jack moves his hand in comforting circles on her back.

"It still gets to me too, sometimes," he says.

_Liar, _she thinks, but appreciates it all the same.

The voice over the speaker gradually announces the chevrons locking into place, but Cassandra does not listen because the remainder of SG-1 troop into the room, one by one, setting hats into place and nervously checking the safety switches on their firearms.

"All set?" Says Daniel with a huge smile, and she wonders how he can be so cheerful when they are traveling to visit a mass grave.

She nods, and Jack lets go of her to give his team stern looks that Cassie probably isn't supposed to notice. Stern looks that mean _this is important to her, _and_ let's not mention what happened last time we were here._ Cassie wraps her arms around herself awkwardly while they whisper among themselves.

She sees Hammond step up to the monitor in the control room above, his hand closing around the microphone as he leans in to inform them that everything is set. "Good luck, SG-1," he says, "Miss Fraiser."

Everything goes quickly after that. SG-1 gather around her and start marching up the ramp, Sam pulling her along gently but firmly. "It's okay honey," she says, quietly, so that nobody else can hear.

Cassie nods. The last time she'd stepped through a Stargate, she'd held both Sam and Daniel's hands. She is too old to ask for that comfort now, but she sure doesn't feel too old to want it.

Jack and Daniel go first, guns at the ready just in case, and Teal'c hovers back behind Sam and Cassie. Cassie pauses when they reach the event horizon, close enough now that she could touch it, if she wanted too. She tries to remember how it felt before, that weird feeling that she now equates with missing a step when you climb a flight of stairs. They didn't have stairs on Hanka. She closes her eyes and lets herself fall forwards, Sam close behind.

They emerge on the other side in one piece, much to Cassie's surprise, and she's halfway torn between throwing up and letting her tears fall because all of a sudden this is Hanka, brown flat plains and unkempt grass, the village all windswept on the horizon, the stern upright SGC sign she remembers SG-7 setting up when she was barely eight years old.

"Whoa," says Jack, and she knows he sees it too: the dead meadows and the dried out husks of the crops that Cassie had hidden in, seven years earlier.

"No one to tend the crops," says Daniel, "No one to tend _anything_."

"Alright," says Jack, noticing the amount of _oh god_ that Cassie feels bubbling up in her stomach. "Daniel, Teal'c, eyes on the gate. Carter, with me. Cass, this is your show – lead the way?" He asks it in such a way that she knows he'd let her go back through the gate if she wanted. But she straightens herself up and nods at him, firmly, because this isn't just _her show, _there are a thousand peoples' ashes in the dead ground beneath her feet. _Her _people._ Her _family.

"That way," she says, raising her hand towards her old village. Hanka is rural, and used to exist on a series of by-roads that intersected by the Stargate. Her village lies to the North, there are more to the South, but it is to her old house that she feels drawn like a firefly. It suddenly strikes her how simple this place is, how backwards; there are no highways or fast-food restaurants or gumball machines. She can barely remember the time when Hanka was all she knew.

The weather is warm; it must be summer here because the heat begins to sear at the backs of their necks. They shuck their outer jackets eagerly, leaving them in a heap at the foot of the Stargate. They leave their bags too, there's no real danger here, only taking the weapons they have strapped to them.

They reach the village in no time. Cassie remembers running back and forth, seeing who could run fastest between the Stargate and the village hall. It hadn't taken them very long then, either. She feels a little sicker, like her stomach is made from hot iron, but other than that she feels mostly numb, like this worn-down shell of a town can't possibly be the same place she thought she'd live her whole life.

"It's different," she says, mostly for her own benefit. "I barely remember it."

Over the years, she tucked Hanka away underneath long division and music theory and how to navigate an airport and how to be a normal earth-kid, but it had always been there beneath the surface, a strange subcutaneous reminder of what she had lost. She had summoned those memories many times over the years, remembering her grandmother or the flowers her father let her tend, but she'd never imagined how _empty_ the place would look now.

"You were very young," says Sam, "And you went through a lot. I'm not surprised you have trouble remembering, it's normal to block out trauma."

Cassie doesn't know how to tell Sam that, actually, she remembers exactly how cold Nirrti's hands had been on her bare skin, remembers the precise smell of dead bodies, the clammy feel of them beneath her hands as she cried "mama" to a woman who would not wake up. She remembers the sterile smell of the SGC, her first night at Janet's house, the nightmares and the tests and the feel of cold concrete as Sam refused to leave her in a bunker to die.

It's just this place she doesn't remember, the twists and turns of the wonky streets; she doesn't remember what the writings on the walls say, doesn't remember the names for the various flowers lying crusted beneath their boots, doesn't remember the gods they used to worship before Nirrti showed up.

"Yeah," she says, instead. "Normal."

She feels adrift but somewhat calmer as they approach the tiny little hut that had belonged to her father, and his father before that. The door is thrown open, and Cassie thinks maybe she left it open on the morning she woke up and found everyone dead. They enter the house in single file and Jack closes it automatically behind him.

"Oh Cass," Sam's voice is barely a breath, "This is beautiful."

The first room is a living room in the most basic sense of the word; it was the room in which they spent almost all of their time, a kitchen and a lounge and a library all at once. It is clean albeit a little dusty, even after all these years, still neat and tidy and untouched. There are dried flowers stuck to the walls that have managed to retain a semblance of color. Cassie remembers how shocked she had been to discover that the flower patterns on Janet's walls were synthetic, not actual flowers.

Sam moves to the table, picks up a crumpled white slip of paper, and Cassie remembers in a flood of nostalgia the way the village elders had asked SG-7 for simple Earth-gifts, farming tools and crayons for the children. The picture that Sam holds is of Cassie and her parents, a tiny little figure in blue standing between them.

"Who's this?" Says Jack, coming up to look over Sam's shoulder and pointing to the shakily-drawn figure on the paper.

"My little brother," she says, and the hurt pierces her anew for a second as she watches their faces fall. "Alexander."

"Oh honey, you never mentioned you had a brother, I-"

"No, it's not like that. He died _before,_ he was only little. He ate something he shouldn't, and…" _Accidents happen, _she thinks with her heart threatening to plummet to her feet, and she looks at Jack, who knows all too well how accidents play out.

She hasn't thought of Alexander in many, many years. He was very young, a pre-schooler by Earth standards, and very noisy, all endless energy and too many questions. He used to be fascinated by the Stargate.

Cassie tenses her shoulders. She _will not _cry in front of Uncle Jack. Between Janet and coming back to Hanka, she feels like there aren't any tears left. She lets out a breath, and it sounds stronger than she feels.

"You guys should collect some of these books," she waves her hand toward the rickety collection of shelves against the far wall, sagging under the weight of so many books piled on top of each other. Her mother had been an avid reader, insatiable, and had even written a few of her own in her tiny practised handwriting. "I'll bet Daniel would love to get his hands on them."

Jack laughs nervously at that, the relief practically spilling off him. "I'll bet."

"I just have to," she points across, to the other room, to the bedrooms beyond, "Check something. If that's ok?"

"Sure Cassie," says Sam, "We'll be right here." She takes her hand as she passes, squeezing gently, before the pair of them move to inspect the bookshelves.

Her parents' bedroom is spotless; after all, they both died in the fields. She touches the starched fabric of their neat comforter tucked over the bed, and _this _she remembers, the scratchy feel of material as she snuggled between her parents in the pitch black night. The oil candles they used to burn, smelling like the kinds of things Janet kept in their bathroom back in Colorado.

Beyond her parents' room is a tiny annex, barely bigger than the room Janet used as an office, and it is in here that Cassandra's old bed is, white covers and carved wood. She sits and feels the hard mattress stuffed with woven straw. She laughs a little to think that she ever found this bed comfortable. It's more bumpy and awkward than the rough cots they have for guests at the base.

She reaches beneath the pillow until her hand clasps on a small piece of paper. It is still there, after all this time. She pulls it out carefully, so as to not tear the edges, and she holds it close to her face so that she can read the faded lettering.

It is a letter from her mother, the oldest thing in the room, written in the slow months before Cassandra was born. It was a Hankan tradition for women to write letters for their unborn children for luck, containing wishes for the child's good health and hopes for what they would grow up to be. They were sealed with warm wax and kept in the house for the child to open on their marriage day, the day they officially became an adult. Cassandra had taken hers from her mother's desk on her last day here and hid it beneath her pillow, before running out to the fields. There she had encountered SG-1, and everything had happened so quickly after that. She had not been allowed to return to fetch anything, never mind something as trivial as a letter. She had never known what her mother wrote.

She opens it now. She is eighteen, an adult by Earth reckoning despite the fact that she feels like an orphaned child all over again. When she unfolds the letter tiny dried flower patters fall out onto her lap and she smiles: her mother had adored flowers. The writing is small and neat, but there isn't much of it. After all these years she had expected some long essay of comfort from her mother, but instead she gets a few short lines.

_I do not know what fate is written in the stars for you, and I can only hope it is good. But I do know that the stars are always changing and your fate is yours to choose. Be strong, child, I will love you for as long as the stars still burn._

It is much, much shorter than the personal letters and official documents that Janet left for her but it feels right, like her mother is reaching through the years and pulling Cassandra into her arms exactly as she used to. It feels like closure, because even though Cassie lives under different stars, she will always have this small piece of Hanka.

She goes back into the back into the main chamber of the house, her feet feeling a little lighter. She hears Sam and Jack talking back and forth in low voices but they stop when they catch sight of her.

"Everything ok?" Sam asks, and passes her share of the books from the shelf over to Jack so that she can take hold of Cassie's shoulder firmly.

It isn't, of course, and the abyss of grief inside her for Janet and for the whole planet she lost is so large, so fresh, that she worries it will never heal. But Cassie nods as she watches Jack struggle with his armful of books and then she smiles. "Everything's ok."

The Hankan sun is still high, but she knows that back on Earth it is almost sundown, almost dinner. Jack will want steaks and Daniel will want Mexican, and they will argue about it until Sam has the sense to order a few pizzas and shut them up with a glare and a beer each. Teal'c will ask Cassie how school is going and she will do her best to explain how complicated college applications are. She hopes they will all stay late, and she can fall asleep in Sam's spare room listening to a team of intergalactic heroes bicker about what to watch on TV.

"I'm ready to go home now," she says, and means it, because even though earth is lightyears away from the place she was born, it is home, definitely home.


End file.
